On March 1, 2010, I joined forces with my friend and colleague Alan Moore, co-presenting an online seminar on "Thriving in Social Media and the Connect Economy". We had something like 33 people with us (and yes... they paid, mostly, as well) and it certainly was an interesting experience, all around. We really learned a lot, thanks to the ultra-patient participants that managed to stick with us through 90 minutes of talking and tech-fixing.
The day after this event I was cruising down the German freeway and figured I should record a short audio comment on my iPhone audio recorder, and share it, see below and here:
Online Seminar : DimDim Review Gerd Leonhard
The bottom line is that while Alan gave a fabulous talk and the eventbrite registration and payment procedure as well as the DimDim webinar interface and basic screen-sharing procedure worked quite nicely, and the participants were really great and very supportive (calling in from San Diego to Japan, no less), the experience itself was seriously diminished by fairly significant technical problems that required constant fixing (e.g. participants re-booting the DimDim page etc). I am not at all sure whether many of these issues had a lot to do with DimDim's platform or servers, but having the presenter's audio drop out completely at several occasions, and for fairly long durations, is just totally unacceptable for the audience.
Never mind that the video feed from Alan and me was mostly not happening as planned, either, or that recording the whole session was a no-go - when I tried this option, the whole seminar came to a screeching halt. If that's all that DimDim can do then... I'm GoneGone.
I am also quite disappointed that - apart from various annoying sales calls on my mobile phone - DimDim's management has not seen it fit to communicate with us, before or after this pretty widely tweeted event, nor have they responded to my contact requests via LinkedIn. I mean, if anyone could possibly prove their business concept and the 'telepresence' idea, it would certainly include people like Alan and myself... would it not?
So, being the gluttons for punishment that we are, we will try this again, on March 23, 12 noon EST, this time using the Cisco / Webex platform, and employing the new 'pay what you think it's worth' model rather than charging up-front. And if you took part in the last session it's free, period. The topic will be 'Monetizing Social Media, Take 2' - details will be announced soon. Join us (new eventbrite sign-up page)
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I am sorry to hear that you encountered issues while hosting your meeting on Dimdim. Please let us know if you are all right with us reaching out to you to find out more and resolve these issues.
I will also let our management know about your attempts to contact us.
Regards
Subhash
Manager, Support
[email protected]
Posted by: Subhash Menon | March 08, 2010 at 05:45 AM